It’s always interesting when the news media, whose job is supposedly to keep us informed, fails to even mention one of the most important stories that’s unfolding in the country. As we’ve seen, the press will devote days of coverage to the plight of federal bureaucrats who can’t respond to a simple email. The idea appears to be that these bureaucrats, as government employees, are entitled to special protections, simply by virtue of working for the government.
But for reasons that no one has explained, these same mainstream media outlets have demonstrated no sympathy — or even the slightest interest — in the ongoing shutdown that’s unfolding in New York’s state prison system. Corrections officers in virtually every single one of New York’s prisons are now on a so-called “wildcat” strike, meaning a strike that’s not approved by the union or allowed by law. This is a strike that’s now in its second week. Nine out of ten corrections officers in the state have walked off the job, saying the working conditions have become extremely unsafe. Prison guards are now constantly being assaulted, and they’ve had enough. As a result, the National Guard has been called in, as part of a desperate bid to prevent a deadly prison takeover, like the one that led to mass casualties in Attica back in the 1970s.
Some of these National Guard units are currently staying in the cells at these prisons in New York. And as of now, it seems likely they’ll be there for a while. Even though New York has offered to double the overtime pay of any correctional officer who goes back to work, it doesn’t look like many of them are taking the government up on that offer.
So how did we arrive at a situation where government employees are encouraged to complain on CNN about an email from Elon Musk, while government employees who say their lives are in danger every time they go to work are being ignored? That doesn’t quite make sense. And it’s especially confusing when you consider the fact that, ordinarily, the fact that corrections officers are refusing to report to duty at roughly 38 of New York’s 42 prisons would be exactly the kind of story that the news media would be interested in. It’s clearly the setup for a potentially significant disaster, and normally the media loves a story like that. But not this time. Why might that be?
If you look into what these correctional officers are demanding, the media blackout starts to make a little more sense. But before I get into the specifics, I want to provide some context first. And I’ll do that by asking a simple question: If you had to guess the average life expectancy of a correctional officer in this country, what would you estimate it to be? For reference, the life expectancy for the general population is around 77 years, which is already relatively low, and it’s still dropping. Law enforcement officers, as a category, have a life expectancy of around 66 years. And that’s obviously pretty bad. But for correctional officers, life expectancy is even lower. In fact, it’s much lower. The average life expectancy for a correctional officer in this country is just 59-years-old. A major reason for that is the stress that the job entails, which leads to a very high rate of suicide.
So already, the baseline is not good. The work conditions, in general, are not exactly ideal. But instead of addressing those work conditions in any meaningful way, in 2022, New York passed something called “The Human Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act,” or HALT Act. This is a law that had its origins in the George Floyd era, and it makes it far more difficult for prison guards to confine dangerous inmates to solitary confinement.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
In particular, the law completely prevents prison guards from putting anyone aged 21 or younger into solitary confinement, for any reason. Yes, they consider 21-year-olds to be a “special population,” as if they’re children. So they can’t be locked away by themselves. That would be unthinkable. Additionally, no matter how old an inmate is, the law states that the maximum amount of time an inmate can be placed in solitary confinement is just 15 days. In other words, even if you’re a 25-year-old gangbanger in peak physical condition, and you’ve decided to constantly assault prison guards and shank other inmates, then you won’t be put in solitary confinement for more than two weeks. After that, you’re free.
New York Democrats passed this law on the theory that solitary confinement is a form of “legalized torture.” Of course, if you’re a sane person, then the idea of being forced to interact with other inmates in a New York state prison, outside of solitary confinement, probably sounds a lot like torture. And also, keep in mind, we’re talking about an extremely dysfunctional group of people here. The only people going into solitary are criminals who ended up in prison, and then committed additional offenses after they were incarcerated. No one is “torturing” these people. We’ve simply run out of places to put them.
But New York’s political leaders disagreed. They decided that it’s more important to have “compassion” for criminals than compassion for prison guards, or for anyone else. And the results have been clear. In the three years since the HALT Act was passed, inmate-on-inmate assaults have increased by nearly 170%. There’s also been a 75% increase in attacks by inmates against prison staff. That’s why, during this strike, the correctional workers have said that their top priority — their main demand — is repealing the HALT Act. Watch:
We give government employees a hard time — rightfully so — but these are government workers who actually perform a necessary job. In fact, it’s not just necessary. Civilized society can’t exist without these people. These correctional officers are not putting together mandatory DEI training sessions at the Pentagon. They’re not auditing people over $600 they received on Venmo. They’re nothing like the government workers we talked about yesterday. They’re our last line of defense that’s keeping extremely dangerous criminals locked up, far away from the rest of us. And yet they’ve been ignored and, it seems, completely abandoned by the leadership in their state. If anything, the state has been actively sabotaging their ability to do their jobs.
And they’ve had some help along the way. In fact, local news stations in New York are still producing sob stories for these criminals. Just the other day, a local news station in Buffalo aired this segment about a convicted murderer who says that the prison guards are wrong, and that we really need the HALT Act to remain in place. Here’s his reasoning. This is one of the most deranged segments you’ll ever see on a news station. Watch:
Notice how the reporter just kind of casually slips in the whole “second-degree murder” thing in the middle of the segment. They introduce Jerome as this reasonable guy who’s upset with solitary confinement. He says it’s comparable to getting his fingernails pulled out. He calls it torture. Then they drop the fact that he’s killed another person, just to get it out of the way. They also don’t mention anything he did while he was incarcerated, which might explain why he was placed in solitary. Instead, they just move right along to the analogy he makes, where he says that normal people wouldn’t want to live in their bathroom for any amount of time.
The logic is pretty solid, right up until you realize that Jerome Wright has committed murder, manslaughter, robbery and burglary. Once you kill another human being, along with a slew of other very serious crimes, then you don’t get to complain about your accommodations in prison. On the other hand, if you don’t murder another human being, then you don’t have to live in your bathroom. You can live anywhere you want. It’s one of the perks of being a non-murderer. That’s how the system works. We don’t want to encourage people to commit murder. We want to discourage it. And one of the ways we do that is by placing murderers in places they don’t want to be. (And by the way, when Jerome Wright was paroled, he tested positive for cocaine during a drug test, then signed a confession admitting he had used cocaine. But we’re supposed to believe that was all a big misunderstanding as well. The Washington Post wrote up a whole sob story about it. So this guy is never responsible for anything that happens to him, essentially. While he’s busy killing people and failing drug tests, it’s our job not to disappoint him. And we just keep failing.)
On the bright side, I can think of one solution that would solve Jerome Wright’s problem, and the problems created by many other murderers like him. It turns out that no one — not a single person — has been executed in the state of New York since 1963. The state has essentially abolished the death penalty. That means that all of the worst, most violent people in the state just stay in the system forever until they die of old age. If we actually had a sensible system of capital punishment that we used on the worst kinds of criminals, then the chaos in our prisons could be greatly reduced, at the very least. Certainly people like Jerome Wright wouldn’t complain about their bathroom-sized cells anymore. And prison guards wouldn’t be assaulted every day. Seems like a win-win.
Then again, no one’s floating that as a possible solution here — just like no one in the mainstream press is talking about this prison strike at all. And they’re not talking about the strike because it’s yet another example of how so-called “criminal justice reform” is, in fact, a disaster waiting to happen. Once again, we’re seeing how “compassion” for criminals, in the end, causes suffering for innocent people. That is the lesson of the HALT Act, and the ongoing crisis unfolding in New York. And before criminals completely seize control of the prison system in one of our largest states, it’s a lesson more people in power need to learn — and quickly.
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
It’s always interesting when the news media, whose job is supposedly to keep us informed, fails to even mention one of the most important stories that’s unfolding in the country. As we’ve seen, the press will devote days of coverage to the plight of federal bureaucrats who can’t respond to a simple email. The idea appears to be that these bureaucrats, as government employees, are entitled to special protections, simply by virtue of working for the government.
But for reasons that no one has explained, these same mainstream media outlets have demonstrated no sympathy — or even the slightest interest — in the ongoing shutdown that’s unfolding in New York’s state prison system. Corrections officers in virtually every single one of New York’s prisons are now on a so-called “wildcat” strike, meaning a strike that’s not approved by the union or allowed by law. This is a strike that’s now in its second week. Nine out of ten corrections officers in the state have walked off the job, saying the working conditions have become extremely unsafe. Prison guards are now constantly being assaulted, and they’ve had enough. As a result, the National Guard has been called in, as part of a desperate bid to prevent a deadly prison takeover, like the one that led to mass casualties in Attica back in the 1970s.
Some of these National Guard units are currently staying in the cells at these prisons in New York. And as of now, it seems likely they’ll be there for a while. Even though New York has offered to double the overtime pay of any correctional officer who goes back to work, it doesn’t look like many of them are taking the government up on that offer.
So how did we arrive at a situation where government employees are encouraged to complain on CNN about an email from Elon Musk, while government employees who say their lives are in danger every time they go to work are being ignored? That doesn’t quite make sense. And it’s especially confusing when you consider the fact that, ordinarily, the fact that corrections officers are refusing to report to duty at roughly 38 of New York’s 42 prisons would be exactly the kind of story that the news media would be interested in. It’s clearly the setup for a potentially significant disaster, and normally the media loves a story like that. But not this time. Why might that be?
If you look into what these correctional officers are demanding, the media blackout starts to make a little more sense. But before I get into the specifics, I want to provide some context first. And I’ll do that by asking a simple question: If you had to guess the average life expectancy of a correctional officer in this country, what would you estimate it to be? For reference, the life expectancy for the general population is around 77 years, which is already relatively low, and it’s still dropping. Law enforcement officers, as a category, have a life expectancy of around 66 years. And that’s obviously pretty bad. But for correctional officers, life expectancy is even lower. In fact, it’s much lower. The average life expectancy for a correctional officer in this country is just 59-years-old. A major reason for that is the stress that the job entails, which leads to a very high rate of suicide.
So already, the baseline is not good. The work conditions, in general, are not exactly ideal. But instead of addressing those work conditions in any meaningful way, in 2022, New York passed something called “The Human Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act,” or HALT Act. This is a law that had its origins in the George Floyd era, and it makes it far more difficult for prison guards to confine dangerous inmates to solitary confinement.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
In particular, the law completely prevents prison guards from putting anyone aged 21 or younger into solitary confinement, for any reason. Yes, they consider 21-year-olds to be a “special population,” as if they’re children. So they can’t be locked away by themselves. That would be unthinkable. Additionally, no matter how old an inmate is, the law states that the maximum amount of time an inmate can be placed in solitary confinement is just 15 days. In other words, even if you’re a 25-year-old gangbanger in peak physical condition, and you’ve decided to constantly assault prison guards and shank other inmates, then you won’t be put in solitary confinement for more than two weeks. After that, you’re free.
New York Democrats passed this law on the theory that solitary confinement is a form of “legalized torture.” Of course, if you’re a sane person, then the idea of being forced to interact with other inmates in a New York state prison, outside of solitary confinement, probably sounds a lot like torture. And also, keep in mind, we’re talking about an extremely dysfunctional group of people here. The only people going into solitary are criminals who ended up in prison, and then committed additional offenses after they were incarcerated. No one is “torturing” these people. We’ve simply run out of places to put them.
But New York’s political leaders disagreed. They decided that it’s more important to have “compassion” for criminals than compassion for prison guards, or for anyone else. And the results have been clear. In the three years since the HALT Act was passed, inmate-on-inmate assaults have increased by nearly 170%. There’s also been a 75% increase in attacks by inmates against prison staff. That’s why, during this strike, the correctional workers have said that their top priority — their main demand — is repealing the HALT Act. Watch:
We give government employees a hard time — rightfully so — but these are government workers who actually perform a necessary job. In fact, it’s not just necessary. Civilized society can’t exist without these people. These correctional officers are not putting together mandatory DEI training sessions at the Pentagon. They’re not auditing people over $600 they received on Venmo. They’re nothing like the government workers we talked about yesterday. They’re our last line of defense that’s keeping extremely dangerous criminals locked up, far away from the rest of us. And yet they’ve been ignored and, it seems, completely abandoned by the leadership in their state. If anything, the state has been actively sabotaging their ability to do their jobs.
And they’ve had some help along the way. In fact, local news stations in New York are still producing sob stories for these criminals. Just the other day, a local news station in Buffalo aired this segment about a convicted murderer who says that the prison guards are wrong, and that we really need the HALT Act to remain in place. Here’s his reasoning. This is one of the most deranged segments you’ll ever see on a news station. Watch:
Notice how the reporter just kind of casually slips in the whole “second-degree murder” thing in the middle of the segment. They introduce Jerome as this reasonable guy who’s upset with solitary confinement. He says it’s comparable to getting his fingernails pulled out. He calls it torture. Then they drop the fact that he’s killed another person, just to get it out of the way. They also don’t mention anything he did while he was incarcerated, which might explain why he was placed in solitary. Instead, they just move right along to the analogy he makes, where he says that normal people wouldn’t want to live in their bathroom for any amount of time.
The logic is pretty solid, right up until you realize that Jerome Wright has committed murder, manslaughter, robbery and burglary. Once you kill another human being, along with a slew of other very serious crimes, then you don’t get to complain about your accommodations in prison. On the other hand, if you don’t murder another human being, then you don’t have to live in your bathroom. You can live anywhere you want. It’s one of the perks of being a non-murderer. That’s how the system works. We don’t want to encourage people to commit murder. We want to discourage it. And one of the ways we do that is by placing murderers in places they don’t want to be. (And by the way, when Jerome Wright was paroled, he tested positive for cocaine during a drug test, then signed a confession admitting he had used cocaine. But we’re supposed to believe that was all a big misunderstanding as well. The Washington Post wrote up a whole sob story about it. So this guy is never responsible for anything that happens to him, essentially. While he’s busy killing people and failing drug tests, it’s our job not to disappoint him. And we just keep failing.)
On the bright side, I can think of one solution that would solve Jerome Wright’s problem, and the problems created by many other murderers like him. It turns out that no one — not a single person — has been executed in the state of New York since 1963. The state has essentially abolished the death penalty. That means that all of the worst, most violent people in the state just stay in the system forever until they die of old age. If we actually had a sensible system of capital punishment that we used on the worst kinds of criminals, then the chaos in our prisons could be greatly reduced, at the very least. Certainly people like Jerome Wright wouldn’t complain about their bathroom-sized cells anymore. And prison guards wouldn’t be assaulted every day. Seems like a win-win.
Then again, no one’s floating that as a possible solution here — just like no one in the mainstream press is talking about this prison strike at all. And they’re not talking about the strike because it’s yet another example of how so-called “criminal justice reform” is, in fact, a disaster waiting to happen. Once again, we’re seeing how “compassion” for criminals, in the end, causes suffering for innocent people. That is the lesson of the HALT Act, and the ongoing crisis unfolding in New York. And before criminals completely seize control of the prison system in one of our largest states, it’s a lesson more people in power need to learn — and quickly.
“}]]
